Sunday, August 10, 2008

Ugly, Dirty Crap

Life may be beautiful, but school is a good place to start learning about ugly and dirty.

You begin the socialization process at around age six by being pushed together with twenty or thirty other kids, many of them with colds and coughs. Kids aren’t particularly decorous about their illnesses. Step into any primary school, and you’re bound to hear the sound of some kid snuffling back so hard on his snot that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner with convulsions.

Then there’s the kid who cuts farts on the school bus—with fifty other kids trapped around him. The smell never varies: rotten eggs that have just burst open, the close-to-the-ground stink that wraps itself around outhouse walls. Strangely, the school bus fart is usually dealt on the way to school, not from. Nothing smells more like early education than packed lunches of apples, cookies, and farts, inside an early morning chill.

Of course, there’s always the kid who pukes all over his desk. And stick around long enough, you’ll come into contact with the pants-shitter.

It’s interesting how we learn to get along with others when we’re little children. Perhaps the first and most important lesson we learn is that ugly dirty crap is part of humanity, and that somehow, other people always seem to stink worse than we do.

3 comments:

Dave
said...

Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, says life, in the state of nature, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." I guess, by the Twenty-First Century, we've pretty much conquered the "solitary" and "short" parts, at least for most people. I guess that's something, although I'd keep thos attributes and lose the "poor", "nasty" and "brutish" parts we seem to have retained.

Hey Dave, I used to know a guy who described himself as "poor, nasty, brutish, and not quite as tall as I'd like to be." It's off-topic, but you brought it to mind. So thanks.

On topic: Yeah, I've sometimes thought that--in spiritual terms, so to speak--childhood is when you get used to having this weird thing called a body. I swear, I always felt weighed down by my little frame when I was a kid. In particular, I remember, I was stunned by the phenomenon of itching. I hated itching with a vengeance. It made me seriously question whether life in general was really worth it.

(Today, as you might have guessed, I'm a world-renowned philosopher. Some of us are deep, some of us aren't....)

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About Me

Born and raised in Norwich, Connecticut, I grew up hearing first-hand stories of WWII partisan fighters from friends of my parents. These stories, absorbed during childhood, probably inspired my interest in the politics of resistance later captured in my novel, THE MASTER PLANETS. The question “Why didn’t more victims fight back?” or, more pointedly, “What happened to the people who did fight back?” became one of the thematic building blocks of the book.
I received my BA (English) from Connecticut College, my MA (English) from Rowan University, and my Doctorate (Education) from Rutgers University. For 23 years I've taught high school English, where I've proudly distributed thousands of bathroom passes and arbitrated numerous battles over vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric, all in the noble cause of imparting “Confrontational Language Arts” to New Jersey adolescents.
My first completed novel, AIN'T NO SIN TO ROCK AND ROLL, was optioned for film. My second, TINA'S '68 MUSTANG, is under revision. THE MASTER PLANETS my third completed novel. Currently I'm working on my next book, STUPID SCHOOL, and a collection of short stories.